Early years
Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, on 28 December 1969. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, the grandson of statistician Leo Törnqvist and of poet Ole Torvalds

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Initially, Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP serverwhere the kernel was first hosted for download, named

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As of 2006, approximately two percent of the Linux kernel was written by Torvalds himself. Because thousands have contributed to the Linux kernel, this percentage is one of the

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Git
Torvalds began development on Git, a piece of version control softwarethat would later become commonly used, on 3 April 2005. On 26 July 2005, Torvalds turned over maintenance of Git to Junio Hamano, a major

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Time magazine has recognized Torvalds multiple times:
• In 2000, he was 17th in their Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century poll.
• In 2004, he was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

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• Torvalds, Linus; Diamond, David (2001). Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. New York City, United States: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-662072-4.
• Himanen, Pekka (2001).

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Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni)—a six-time Finnish national karatechampion—whom he first met in late 1993. Linus was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendees to send him an

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